Tips to start with
TES Online Guide

Without a doubt, developing a certain branch of crafting (or a few of them, if you want to spend more time doing so) will take dozens (if not hundreds) of hours of arduous gameplay, which may, at first glance, seem as a wasted time - you can get the items on your own, through a drop, quests or simply buy from someone else, right? There's a lot of truth in that, but besides creating items for your own business, you can earn insane amounts of money (virtual, in-game money, i.e. gold), making various items for other players (who lacked the motivation to get through the whole process of crafting, or they simply want to enjoy other sides of the game, like questing, partying with other people, exploring the world, or simply slaying thousands of monsters). This can be further increased by joining a guild targeted at trade (and there's plenty of them, independently of the language you are playing with / you want to speak with), or any other, "normal" guild (the requisition for items is omnipresent).

Here's some few quick tips, which may come in handy on your road to becoming a successful crafter:

1. If you are not planning on becoming a trader, but you still want to play a little with the crafting system, think about which items (either armor, or weapons) you will want to use and try to develop those branches of crafting, which permit you to create them. You want to be a mage-like character? - focus on investing your time in Woodworking (to be able to make various staff weapons) and Clothing (in order to gain access to Light Armor).

2. If you want to have anything with a certain branch of crafting (or several types of them), do so from the very beginning of your journey. Having an attitude like "I will first level up my character, then I will think about crafting" ends up the same, independently of the MMO you are playing - a painful, arduous, insanely boring and never ending series of trips in order to find items (either the stuff to deconstruct, or materials to make items from) required, in order to develop a certain branch of crafting. A complete lack of an Auction House does not help either - if you lack the required items (and you don't want to waste several hours to find them, or you simply don't know where to look), you are left with the in-game chat, or joining up a guild, but both of those solutions may end up costing you a ton of gold.

3. Don't invest in meaningless abilities from the crafting skill lines of different branches - some of them are completely useless, or you can easily handle yourself without them, and the points you save from doing so can be invested into something more beneficial. In the further parts of this guide, you will find explanation of all the skills from the crafting system, with the emphasis on which must be taken, which should be and which skills you should avoid.

4. Try to "use / loot" all the bookshelves encountered on your journey - they offer a decent amount of experience in a certain skill tree, which should speed up your work considerably. Even if you won't "hit the right tree", the one you want to develop, additional experience gained in some "useless" (at that time) tree can come in handy later on in the game. This method is extremely beneficial in case of Enchanting, because it's very hard to develop this crafting branch in a "typical" way, because of how scarce the resources are.

5. Search and loot all the containers (chests, barrels - everything that may have items hidden inside) that you stumble upon during your journey - inside, you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of items required for different branches of crafting (or simply useful to yourself). Most of all, inside, you can find (though it is an extremely rare finding) books, which will teach you how to make items in other race's styles (remember, you start with only your own race style). You can, obviously, buy those books from other players, but their prices (especially for a beginning player, with a small gold stock) are simply astronomical.

6. If you don't have a thing for collecting all the items in the game, don't waste your time searching through millions of containers to get all the crafting styles - without a visual aspect, they do not differ from the one you start with. If you, however, want to spend your time crafting the items, and later on selling them off to players, try to unlock all the styles in the game, because some players are willing to pay additional gold (and loads of it, to be exact) for you to make their items in a certain style.